Decision costs in legislative bargaining: An experimental analysis

Luis Miller and Christoph Vanberg

No 2011002, Discussion Papers from University of Oxford, Nuffield College

Abstract: We conduct an experiment to assess the effects of different decision rules on the costs of decision making in a multilateral bargaining situation. Specifically, we compare the amount of costly delay observed in an experimental bargaining game under majority and unanimity rule. Our main finding is that individual subjects are more likely to reject offers under unanimity rule. This increased rejection rate, as well as the requirement that all subjects agree, leads to more costly delay. This result provides empirical support for a classic argument in favor of less-than-unanimity decision rules put forth by Buchanan and Tullock (1962).

Keywords: Collective decision-making; Majority rule; Unanimity; Legislative bargaining; Experimental economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C78 C92 D71 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-gth and nep-hpe
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk/documents/DP2011/CESS_DP2011_002.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to cess-wb.nuff.ox.ac.uk:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
Journal Article: Decision costs in legislative bargaining: an experimental analysis (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cex:dpaper:2011002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from University of Oxford, Nuffield College Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wojtek Przepiorka ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).